`Corrupticut' No More? Ethics Reforms Welcome

May 01, 2005|By MICHELE JACKLIN Michele Jacklin is The Courant's political columnist. Her column appears every Wednesday and Sunday. To leave her a comment, please call 860-241-3163 or write to mjacklin@courant.com.

This was supposed to be the year of ethics reform. To that end, state legislators have come through with flying colors.

A 64-page state and municipal ethics bill, loaded down with everything but the kitchen sink, is bouncing along from committee to committee on its way to the floor. Then, there are two proposals -- competing House and Senate versions -- to restructure the State Ethics Commission. They don't quite have the heft of the omnibus bill, but they do cover a fair amount of ground.

These bills represent the good-faith effort of Gov. M. Jodi Rell and the legislature to redress the wrongs that have come to light in the past couple of years, compliments of our corrupt ex-governor, his willing accomplices, greedy contractors, two ne'er-do-well mayors, inept agency heads, officials who just don't get it (including the presumably smart University of Connecticut athletics director and his coaches) and a largely dysfunctional ethics commission.

All in all, it's been an entertaining few years. But, as Rell and legislative leaders have acknowledged, enough is enough. It's time to ditch ``Corrupticut.'' The Land of Steady Habits may be a deadly dull moniker but it's a heckuva lot better, public relations-wise, to be known as a place of eternal constancy than a hotbed of malfeasance.

And so, there's a pretty good likelihood that a couple of the ethics bills will pass, assuming a couple of things: that House and Senate Democrats can set aside their egos and settle on a restructuring bill (among other points of contention, they're fighting over whether staffers should be allowed to keep their current jobs), and that House and Senate Republicans quit trying to gut the municipal lobbying and reporting requirements. Those are big assumptions, but a state's reputation is at stake.

Any discussion of ethics reform would be incomplete without interjecting a note of caution. Connecticut can't legislate for every circumstance. The gift ban can be ironclad, the revolving door sealed tight, the politics taken out of ethics commission appointments, and still there will be situations that aren't foreseen, conflicts that can't be anticipated, people who don't tell the truth.

For example, the bill requiring cities and towns to adopt ethics codes and form ethics panels wisely has a provision that bars employees covered by the municipal code from serving on the ethics board.

There's no equivalent prohibition in either the state ethics code or the bill. So right now, we have the awkward situation of Hugh MacGill, a professor of law at UConn, serving as chairman of the ethics commission. What makes it awkward? Well, McGill has confirmed that his agency is investigating UConn and its ticket-for-cars bartering scheme and its ``celebrity'' (read: famous basketball coaches) exemptions. What's more, many of the ethics commission's decisions affect state employees, of which he is one.

The long and short of it is that MacGill, for all his brilliance and integrity, should never have been named to the commission, much less made its chairman. But his obvious conflict of interest went unnoticed until recently, when Rep. Christopher Caruso, a co-author of the ethics bills, raised it as an issue. At the very least, the omnibus bill needs to be amended to address that oversight.

Another thing: How do you take the politics out of appointments? One of the restructuring bills calls for the creation of an Open Government Selection Commission, whose nine members would, in turn, appoint the five members of the new Commission on Public Integrity. But who appoints the open government commission? The governor and the top six legislative leaders -- politicians by any other name. So the politics haven't really been exorcised from the system, they're just one step removed.

Then there's the municipal piece. Local officials have been furiously lobbying to water down the requirements, particularly one calling for certain officials to file financial disclosure statements. ``It will be the end of small-town government and volunteerism,'' they claim.

Pshaw. The only information the officials would have to disclose is their employer and occupation. Plus, each would have to sign a statement affirming that he ``will not take official action on any matter in which he has a conflict of interest.''

If local officials consider that intrusive or onerous, they shouldn't be serving. They're probably up to no good.